Playing ping-pong with apartheid: from the Casbah to Stockholm
In the mid-1950s, when apartheid was at its height, a remarkable set of circumstances propelled a group of table tennis lovers onto the world stage. Many of them would have their origins in the Casbah. It would evoke a vicious backhand from the apartheid bosses. At the same time, this episode inspired an incredible commitment to the non-racial sports movement that would be the catalyst for an international boycott. Huge sacrifices would be made by players and administrators, and this column seeks to pay homage to those whom history has forgotten, writes Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed
TABLE tennis was a sport squeezed into confined spaces, played at all hours in the halls and larger verandas that dotted the Casbah. In many ways, it was a counter to the snooker saloons with their gangsters, alcohol and bets on the side. The small areas made for a particularly aggressive game that eschewed defence and relied on attack and spin. Many boards were home-made, painted green, and balls and bats were bare.
The game took off in the '50s with better organisation and equipment. Competitions and media coverage provided an edge, and many would-be tennis players took to the table in the absence of courts.
The roots of table tennis were planted in the Casbah in the early ‘20s and centred on religious-based youth clubs. A non-racial Southern Natal Table Tennis Board was constituted in 1939 with EH Ismail as president, and a non-racial South African Table Tennis Board (SATTB) was formed in 1948. There were two South African associations: the non-racial SATTB and the whites-only South African Table Tennis Union (SATTU).
A representative of (the white) SATTU visited the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) president Ivor Montagu in 1948 to seek membership, but the application was unanimously rejected. The ITTF constitution was clear that any association applying for membership “must enable participation in it of citizens irrespective of colour, race or creed”.
In 1950, both the non-racial SATTB and SATTU applied for membership. SATTB was granted “good standing” rather than full membership, meaning it could participate internationally, with the proviso that the two South African bodies would try to work together. This was not possible. The position of the apartheid government was clear. Minister of the Interior, Dr TE Donges, announced on June 27, 1956, almost a year after the adoption of the Freedom Charter, that non-European sporting activities “must accord with the policy of ‘separate development’. Whites and non-whites should organise their sporting activities separately…”
Through a quirk of history, a game played in the backstreets of the Casbah was catapulted onto the world stage in 1957 when SATTB was invited to send a five-person team to the World Table Tennis Championships in Stockholm, Sweden.
Cassim Peer, the captain, MGH (Pops) Mullah, PR (Bandy) Mandan, Dennis Groenewald, Ashwin Valjee and the manager Cassim Bassa went to Stockholm. Table tennis had a strong base in Natal under the leadership of President RM Patel, vice-president Cassim Bassa, and Treasurer D Kallipersadh. Cassim Peer was the records clerk. Bassa was also president of the SATTB and a member of the Development Committee of the International Table Tennis Federation.
Sports like cricket, soccer and rugby played officially on the international stage if they were the teams of apartheid. Table tennis somehow breached the laager, and suddenly the world had opened for non-racial sports persons.
Several of the team members had deep roots in the Casbah. Cassim Bassa’s father had an import agency with offices on Commercial Road. Bassa matriculated from Sastri College in 1944 and joined the Natal Indian Congress in 1948. He was a research assistant in the Department of Economics at the University of Natal for several years, allowing him to enter a world of debate and books.
His research gave him an in-depth awareness of poverty beyond the world of the Casbah. It also turned him to a life of social welfare, serving as president of the Natal Indian Blind and Deaf Society and as an official of numerous special education bodies. Notably, he lent his organising qualities to sport as an administrator. He was integral to building the non-racial sports movement in South Africa from the fifties to the eighties.
Cassim Peer, the first South African captain of a non-racial table tennis team, grew up in Victoria Street, where his family of 10 lived in a two-bedroomed flat. His father ran a small retail store opposite the market on Victoria Street. Cassim Peer worked for the AI Kajee Agencies in Albert Street and subsequently for a clothing company. Confined to a small flat, Peer played the game at the Muslim Institute in Queen Street, where he mastered table tennis’s physical and mental intricacies.
Pops Moolla’s family was from the South Coast, but he lived in Carlisle Street from the ‘60s to the ‘80s. He also mastered the game at the Muslim Institute.
Ashwin Valjee grew up on Victoria Street and like many of his time, he matriculated from Sastri College. An outstanding student, he qualified as a medical doctor at the University of Natal and in 1979 as a psychiatrist, the first person of colour to achieve this in KwaZulu-Natal. Dr Valjee established his practice in the Casbah’s Lorne Street and enjoyed a distinguished medical career, while being involved in many aspects of community life. He was a flamboyant figure who loved sports cars, driving the latest model Alfa Romeo.
The team that assembled to make the trip to Stockholm represented the finest in non-racial table tennis in the country.
Cassim Peer, the captain, was the South African champion in 1952 and 1954. At sixteen, Ashwin Valjee achieved the unique feat of becoming the junior and senior South African open singles champion in the same year. Valjee was the South African champion in 1956, 1958 and 1966. Pops Moolla won the championship in 1960 and 1964. Cassim Peer and E Randeree were the South African doubles champs in 1950; Moolla and I Timol in 1952; Peer and Moolla in 1954 and 1956; and Valjee and Moolla in 1960.
The team’s departure for Stockholm made national headlines. According to a press report “sporting history was made last Wednesday (February 27) when five players left Jan Smuts Airport to take part in the World Table Tennis Championships , hich will begin in Stockholm, Sweden, on Wednesday (March 6).”
The report stated that the team was “the first world-recognised Non-White team of Springboks to take part in international games”/ The players had to travel as individuals and not as a team for fear that the government would deny them passports. En route, they played friendly matches in Denmark at the invitation of the Danish Table Tennis Association and participated in England after Sweden where the championship ended on March 15.
The South Africans participated as individuals and for the team event, the Swaythling Cup, donated in 1926 by Lady Baroness Swaythling, mother of Ivor Montagu, the first president of the ITTF.
The team understandably underperformed because of the lack of high-quality training, domestic competition, facilities, and equipment. The South Africans were still playing with table tennis bats made of wood with a layer of pimpled rubber on top, which gave the bat a bumpy surface. In the 1950s, the Japanese introduced the sponge racket, which had a layer of foam underneath the layer of rubber. These bats helped the ball spin and move faster and were only introduced to non-racial table tennis in South Africa after Sweden. The Japanese led the way in table tennis and won the men’s and women’s team competition, while Toshiaka Tanaka and Fujie Eguchie, both of Japan, won the men’s and women’s individual gold medals.
The tour was nevertheless a historic occasion. Chief Albert Luthuli, president of the ANC, complimented the table tennis board in his 1956 address to the Natal branch of the ANC: “When a people come to the realisation of their plight and begin to fight back unitedly, there is surely room for jubilation and optimism. The fight equally is being fought on every front. The fight has been won by the SA Table Tennis Association [sic], which has gained international recognition”.
Stockholm was to prove just a moment, and soon the apartheid state clamped down on the right of “non-whites” to represent the country internationally. They decreed that this would be the preserve of the white minority. Bassa represented the SATTB at the 1959 meeting of the ITTF in Dortmund, Germany. In a typically vindictive act, the apartheid government confiscated his passport when he returned. It did not deter Bassa as he turned his attention to building a powerful internal sports movement that would inspire a global anti-apartheid response.
The government saw table tennis as a threat because it envisioned that this would open the floodgates to the international representation of sports that refused to toe the apartheid line. Bassa, though, was elected a member of the ITTF advisory committee at the Peking congress in absentia and vice-president of the African Table Tennis Federation during the ‘60s. The SATTB was accepted as a full member of the ITTF at the Stockholm Congress in 1967.
During the transition out of apartheid, South Africa sent a team to the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which included two table tennis players; one black, Cheryl Roberts from SATTB, and one white, Louis Botha, from SATTU.
SATTB and SATTU signed a declaration of intent onJuly 21, 1991, to unite the two bodies into one controlling body for table tennis in South Africa.
Cheryl Roberts hailed from the coloured township of Wentworth, Durban. Paging through the SACOS legends Facebook page, one sees a young Cheryl Roberts in SACOS colours in the early eighties. To her left is Cassim Bassa, manager of the team. From different eras, they were still fighting the same battle: “no normal sport in an abnormal society”.
Adapted from Desai and Vahed’s Durban's Casbah: Bunny Chows, Bolsheviks and Bioscopes (UKZN Press, 2023), which was given the award for “Best Monograph for 2024” by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The book is available at Ikes Bookshop at 48 Florida Road, Durban.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.